by Lorrie Moore
The Puerto Rican woman was there and she helped me clean up. She had dry papery hands and when she rubbed the towel on my chest, she did it hard, like I was a bumper she was waxing. She was very thin and had a cloud of brown hair rising above her narrow face and the sharpest, blackest eyes you’ve ever seen.
He’s cute, she said to Papi. What’s your name? she asked me. Are you Rafa?
I shook my head.
Then it’s Yunior, right?
I nodded.
You’re the smart one, she said, suddenly happy with herself. Maybe you want to see my books?
They weren’t hers. I recognized them as ones my father must have left in her house. Papi was a voracious reader, couldn’t even go cheating without a paperback in his pocket.
Why don’t you go watch TV? Papi suggested. He already had his hand on her ass and didn’t care that I was watching. He was looking at her like she was the last piece of chicken on earth.
We got plenty of channels, she said. Use the remote if you want.
The two of them went upstairs and I was too scared of what was happening to poke around. I just sat there, ashamed, expecting something big and fiery to crash down on all our heads. I watched a whole hour of the news before Papi came downstairs and said, Let’s go.
About two hours later the women laid out the food and like always nobody but the kids thanked them. It must have been some Dominican tradition or something. There was everything I liked—chicharrónes, fried chicken, tostones, sancocho, rice, fried cheese, yucca, avocado, potato salad, a meteor-sized hunk of pernil, even a tossed salad, which I could do without—but when I joined the other kids around the serving table, Papi said, Oh, no you don’t, and took the paper plate out of my hand. His fingers weren’t gentle.
What’s wrong now? Tía asked, handing me another plate.
He ain’t eating, Papi said. Mami pretended to help Rafa with the pernil.
Why can’t he eat?
Because I said so.
The adults who didn’t know us made like they hadn’t heard a thing and Tío just smiled sheepishly and told everybody to go ahead and eat. All the kids—about ten of them now—trooped back into the living room with their plates aheaping, and all the adults ducked into the kitchen and the dining room, where the radio was playing loud-ass bachatas. I was the only one without a plate. Papi stopped me before I could get away from him. He kept his voice nice and low so nobody else could hear him.
If you eat anything, I’m going to beat you. ¿Entiendes?
I nodded.
And if your brother gives you any food, I’ll beat him, too. Right here in front of everybody. ¿Entiendes?
I nodded again. I wanted to kill him, and he must have sensed it because he gave my head a little shove.
All the kids watched me come in and sit down in front of the TV.
What’s wrong with your dad? Leti asked.
He’s a dick, I said.
Rafa shook his head. Don’t say that shit in front of people.
Easy for you to be nice when you’re eating, I said.
Hey, if I was a pukey little baby, I wouldn’t get no food either.
I almost said something back but I concentrated on the TV. I wasn’t going to start it. No fucking way. So I watched Bruce Lee beat Chuck Norris into the floor of the Coliseum and tried to pretend that there was no food anywhere in the house. It was Tía who finally saved me. She came into the living room and said, Since you ain’t eating, Yunior, you can at least help me get some ice.
I didn’t want to, but she mistook my reluctance for something else.
I already asked your father.
She held my hand while we walked; Tía didn’t have any kids but I could tell she wanted them. She was the sort of relative who always remembered your birthday but who you only went to visit because you had to. We didn’t get past the first-floor landing before she opened her pocketbook and handed me the first of three pastelitos she had smuggled out of the apartment.
Go ahead, she said. And as soon as you get inside, make sure you brush your teeth.
Thanks a lot, Tía, I said.
Those pastelitos didn’t stand a chance.
She sat next to me on the stairs and smoked her cigarette. All the way down on the first floor we could hear the music and the adults and the television. Tía looked a ton like Mami; the two of them were both short and light-skinned. Tía smiled a lot and that was what set them the most apart.
How is it at home, Yunior?
What do you mean?
How’s it going in the apartment? Are you kids okay?
I knew an interrogation when I heard one, no matter how sugar-coated or oblique it was. I didn’t say anything. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my tía, but something told me to keep my mouth shut. Maybe it was family loyalty, maybe I just wanted to protect Mami or I was afraid that Papi would find out—it could have been anything really.
Is your mom all right?
I shrugged.
Have there been lots of fights?
None, I said. Too many shrugs would have been just as bad as an answer. Papi’s at work too much.
Work, Tía said, like it was somebody’s name she didn’t like.
Me and Rafa, we didn’t talk much about the Puerto Rican woman. When we ate dinner at her house, the few times Papi had taken us over there, we still acted like nothing was out of the ordinary. Pass the ketchup, man. No sweat, bro. The affair was like a hole in our living room floor, one we’d gotten so used to circumnavigating that we sometimes forgot it was there.
By midnight all the adults were getting crazy on the dance floor. I was sitting outside Tía’s bedroom, where Madai was sleeping, trying not to attract attention. Rafa had me guarding the door; he and Leti were in there, too, with some of the other kids, getting busy no doubt. Wilquins had gone across the hall to bed, so I had only the roaches to mess around with.
Whenever I peered into the main room I saw about twenty moms and dads dancing and drinking beers. Every now and then somebody yelled, Quisqueya! And then everybody else would yell and stomp their feet. From what I could see, my parents seemed to be enjoying themselves.
Mami and Tía spent a lot of time side by side, whispering, and I kept expecting something to come of this, a brawl maybe. I’d never once been out with my family when it hadn’t turned to shit. We were a Doomsday on wheels. We weren’t even theatrical or straight crazy like other families. We fought like sixth graders, without any real dignity. I guess the whole night I’d been waiting for a blowup, something between Papi and Mami. This was how I always figured Papi would be exposed, out in public, where everybody would know.
You’re a cheater!
But everything was calmer than usual. And Mami didn’t look like she was about to say anything to Papi. The two of them danced every now and then, but they never lasted more than a song before Mami rejoined Tía in whatever conversation they were having.
I tried to imagine Mami before Papi. Maybe I was tired, or just sad, thinking about the way my family was. Maybe I already knew how it would all end up in a few years, Mami without Papi, and that was why I did it. Picturing her alone wasn’t easy. It seemed like Papi had always been with her, even when we were waiting in Santo Domingo for him to send for us.
The only photograph our family had of Mami as a young woman, before she married Papi, was the one that somebody took of her at an election party, which I found one day while rummaging for money to go to the arcade. Mami had it tucked into her immigration papers. In the photo, she’s surrounded by laughing cousins I will never meet who are all shiny from dancing, whose clothes are rumpled and loose. You can tell it’s night and hot and that the mosquitoes have been biting. She sits straight, and even in a crowd she stands out, smiling quietly like maybe she’s the one everybody’s celebrating. You can’t see her hands but I imagined they’re knotting a straw or a bit of thread. This was the woman my father met a year later on the Malecón, the woman Mami thought she’d always be.
Mami mu
st have caught me studying her because she stopped what she was doing and gave me a smile, maybe her first one of the night. Suddenly I wanted to go over and hug her, for no other reason than I loved her, but there were about eleven fat jiggling bodies between us. So I sat down on the tiled floor and waited.
I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew Rafa was kicking me and saying, Let’s go. He looked like he’d been hitting off those girls; he was all smiles. I got to my feet in time to kiss Tía and Tío goodbye. Mami was holding the serving dish she had brought with her.
Where’s Papi? I asked.
He’s downstairs, bringing the van around. Mami leaned down to kiss me.
You were good today, she said.
And then Papi burst in and told us to get the hell downstairs before some pendejo cop gave him a ticket. More kisses, more handshakes, and then we were gone.
I don’t remember being out of sorts after I met the Puerto Rican woman, but I must have been, because Mami only asked me questions when she thought something was wrong in my life. It took her about ten passes but finally she cornered me one afternoon when we were alone in the apartment. Our upstairs neighbors were beating the crap out of their kids, and me and her had been listening to it all afternoon. She put her hand on mine and said, Is everything okay, Yunior? Have you been fighting with your brother?
Me and Rafa had already talked. We’d been in the basement, where our parents couldn’t hear us. He told me that yeah, he knew about her.
Papi’s taken me there twice now.
Why didn’t you tell me? I asked.
What the hell was I going to say?
I didn’t say anything to Mami either. She watched me, very, very closely. Later I would think, maybe if I had told her, she would have confronted him, would have done something, but who can know these things? I said I’d been having trouble in school, and like that everything was back to normal between us. She put her hand on my shoulder and squeezed, and that was that.
We were on the turnpike, just past Exit 11, when I started feeling it again. I sat up from leaning against Rafa. His fingers smelled and he’d gone to sleep almost as soon as he got into the van. Madai was out, too, but at least she wasn’t snoring.
In the darkness, I saw that Papi had a hand on Mami’s knee and that the two of them were quiet and still. They weren’t slumped back or anything; they were both wide awake, buckled into their seats. I couldn’t see either of their faces and no matter how hard I tried I could not imagine their expressions. Every now and then the van was filled with the bright rush of somebody else’s headlights. Finally I said, Mami, and they both looked back, already knowing what was happening.
2000–2010
With the events of 9/11 came a sense that fiction and even literature was irrelevant. The irony so popular in the 1990s suddenly seemed beside the point. New York, home to so many writers and publishers, was shaken to its core. In her foreword to the 2002 volume, series editor Katrina Kenison wrote, “Preoccupied with the unfathomable changes in our world at large, it was almost impossible to focus on the details of a smaller picture.” In the 2003 volume, Nicole Krauss’s story “Future Emergencies” indirectly addressed the attacks in New York. In 2004 Joyce Carol Oates and David Foster Wallace published stories that featured, directly and indirectly, 9/11. Despite the preponderance of flags raised and anthems sung across the country, though, few stories romanticized patriotism or “denaturalized” (in series editor Edward O’Brien’s words) the event.
Before long, short stories began to address, with both irony and outrage, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and the 2008 economic collapse. Perhaps because of the Internet and its ability to connect people instantaneously—or because of the location of the 9/11 attacks, closer to home than ever before—the grieving period necessary for earlier generations to write effectively of war seemed to have shrunk.
Writers such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Edwidge Danticat, Daniel Alarcón, and David Bezmozgis explored the immigrant experience in the United States. Ha Jin, Mary Yukari Waters, and Aleksandar Hemon portrayed current and historic postwar daily realities and cultural norms in other countries.
The Great Recession brought about a sea change in magazine and book publishing. The struggling economy coupled with the flood of new e-readers that offered major discounts led to decreased circulations in magazines as well as decreased book sales. Book publishers became less willing to take chances on story collections by new writers. Cuts were made at publishing houses. The Atlantic annexed its fiction to a separate fiction-only issue offered just once a year, and eventually stopped publishing this issue altogether in favor of occasionally featuring fiction in its monthly. Many magazines, such as TriQuarterly, opted to save production costs by moving entirely online.
There came a hunger for more entertaining short fiction. Genre-bending or -blending became popular. In 2005 guest editor Michael Chabon wrote:
The original sense of the word entertainment is a lovely one of mutual support through intertwining . . . between reader and writer . . . We ought not to restrict ourselves to one type or category. Science fiction, fantasy, crime fiction—all these genres and others have rich traditions in the American short story, reaching straight back to Poe and Hawthorne . . . But the same process of commercialization and mass appeal that discredited entertainment, or the idea of literature as entertainment, also devastated our notion of the kinds of short stories that belong in college syllabi, prestigious magazines, or yearly anthologies of the best American short stories (another victory, in my view, for the enemies of pleasure, in their corporate or ivory towers).
After Story magazine folded, new magazines like Tin House, McSweeney’s, and Zoetrope: All-Story became instrumental in discovering and publishing new talent.
In 2006 I was offered the role of series editor. At the time I was, like Ravenel and Kenison had been, an editor at Houghton Mifflin. I was raised in Concord, Massachusetts, attended McGill University in Montreal as an undergraduate, and got my MFA at Emerson College in Boston. I got a temp job as the receptionist at Houghton Mifflin, and before long I was hired as an assistant to an editor who published travel guides. When Houghton sold off this line of books, I was lucky to be hired as an assistant to a fiction editor, who went on to become publisher. I worked as an assistant and eventually an editor for nine years.
I suspect that my first year as series editor will be one of my most memorable. I published my first novel, gave birth to twins, and worked with Stephen King, who insisted on reading along with me to ensure that I gave close consideration to science fiction and horror. In my first foreword, I wrote, “I was drawn to stories that transcended something . . . the stories I chose twisted and turned away from the familiar and ultimately took flight, demanding their own particular characters and structure and prose.” I also mentioned my predilection for surprise, “[a story] that quietly taps the reader on the shoulder and then takes her breath away without revealing any of its secrets.”
For the remainder of the decade I worked with Salman Rushdie, who was jarred by the number of stories about golf that Americans wrote; Alice Sebold, reluctant to have to name “the best” of anything; and Richard Russo, who, like Chabon, called in his introduction for stories to be entertaining as well as instructive.
My reading process is probably messier than my predecessors’. I mark up literary journals as I read, making comments beside the tables of contents about the stories that I like and why. I pull any story that I finish reading.
Long ago, Edward O’Brien wrote letters to notify authors that their story had been selected for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories. When I started as series editor, I e-mailed all the contributors. Occasionally I must reach them on Facebook. All my correspondence with authors and guest editors and magazine editors is now done online. Although I occasionally read online, I prefer that magazines print out digital stories and submit them to me via snailmail.
2000
JHUMPA LA
HIRI
The Third and Final Continent
from The New Yorker
JHUMPA LAHIRI was born in London in 1967 and raised in Rhode Island. She earned degrees in English, Creative Writing and Renaissance Studies from Barnard College and Boston University.
Lahiri’s short story collection Interpreter of Maladies was published in 1999. The stories mostly explore the lives of recent immigrants and their children. Lahiri later wrote, “When I first started writing I was not conscious that my subject was the Indian-American experience. What drew me to my craft was the desire to force the two worlds I occupied to mingle on the page as I was not brave enough, or mature enough, to allow in life.” Her story collection received the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (rare for a story collection) as well as the PEN/Hemingway Award and The New Yorker Debut of the Year.
Lahiri’s novel The Namesake was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Lahiri is also the author of Unaccustomed Earth, which received the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and The Lowland, a novel that was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award, and won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. In the New York Times, Siddhartha Deb said that in Lahiri’s work, “the political is always personal.”
Lahiri is a member of the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities, appointed by President Barack Obama. She was also appointed a member of the Committee on the Arts and Humanities. She is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Her first work written directly in Italian, “In Altre Parole,” was published in 2015.
★
I LEFT INDIA IN 1964 with a certificate in commerce and the equivalent, in those days, of ten dollars to my name. For three weeks I sailed on the S.S. Roma, an Italian cargo vessel, in a cabin next to the ship’s engine, across the Arabian Sea, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, and finally to England. I lived in London, in Finsbury Park, in a house occupied entirely by penniless Bengali bachelors like myself, at least a dozen and sometimes more, all struggling to educate and establish ourselves abroad.
